For many service-based businesses, the key to maximizing efficiency, and income, is to maximize the number of client appointments scheduled and completed each day. As a specific example, healthcare service providers typically desire to maximize the number of patient appointments to be scheduled and completed each business day. However, this same situation applies to numerous other service providers such a law offices, hair salons, etc. As a result, most service-based businesses now rely on computing system implemented appointment scheduling systems that track client appointments scheduled with the service provider and help schedule an optimum number of client appointments for any given business day well in advance. These appointment scheduling systems also help ensure that issues such as overbooking of client appointments do not occur, thereby increasing client satisfaction while at the same time maximizing the number of client appointments that are scheduled.
Due, in large part, to the use of calendar applications, appointment scheduling applications and systems, and the wide spread adoption of various computing systems and mobile computing systems, the scheduling of appointments is now more efficient and accurate than ever before. However, one side effect of the efficiency of modern appointment scheduling systems and calendars is that these systems allow for appointment scheduling that is often more accurate, precise, and reliable than either the clients/customers being scheduled for the appointment and/or the service providers. Consequently, in many cases, appointments are scheduled so efficiently that the resulting appointment schedules do not provide enough margin of error, or buffer space, to take into account the realities of modern life that prevent many appointments from taking place at the scheduled time and/or in the allotted time. However, delays due to preceding appointments running longer than expected, traffic, emergencies, or any one or more of the multitude of other issues that daily cause one or more parties to a scheduled appointment to be running late are indeed a reality and are very common.
As a result, using currently available appointment scheduling systems, it often happens that when one or more parties to an appointment are late, the appointment scheduling system is thrown off as other scheduled appointments are shifted to later times by the ripple effect created by the single late event. This ripple effect often extends well beyond the single late appointment, and/or the parties to the late appointment, as all other scheduled calendar events and appointment times for that day are, for all practical purposes, shifted to a later time.
As a specific example, when a client, such as a patient, shows up 20 minutes late for a service provider appointment, such as a doctor's appointment, the service provider is currently forced to either cancel the appointment, in which case the service provider's “billable” time is lost, and income is lost, or accept/wait for the late client and thereby force every other client scheduled to see that service provider later that day to be essentially shifted to an appointment time that is 20 minutes later. To make matters worse, the cumulative effect of several of these incidents often results in very long client wait times, and ultimately, a less than ideal client experience. In addition, in some cases it is the service provider who is running late due to not only late appointments, but also appointments that run longer than expected, or emergencies, or for any other reason, and the service provider may be the party who is unavailable at the scheduled appointment time.
Using currently available appointment scheduling systems, parties scheduled for a given appointment have no indication that another party is running late for the scheduled appointment unless the late party takes one or more proactive actions to inform the other party to the appointment that they will be late. However, since the late party is running late, and therefore is, by definition, under time pressure and/or is engaged in another activity, it is often the case that the late party does not, or cannot, take the action necessary to inform the other party to the appointment that they are running late.
In addition, even in cases when the late party does inform the other party to the appointment that they are running late, the late party often fails to inform the other party that they are running late in time to take corrective action, such as filling in the time slot with another client/customer appointment.
In addition, even in cases when the late party does inform the other party to the appointment that they are running late, the late party often does not have any way to reasonably estimate when they will arrive. As an example, when traffic is causing the delay, it often happens that the late party cannot accurately estimate the remaining travel time.
The result of the situation described above is the introduction of inefficiencies, stress, lost income, and wasted time. In addition, these negative results are often imposed not only on the parties to a given appointment, but also numerous other “innocent” parties scheduled for other appointments. Consequently, even though currently available appointment scheduling systems theoretically allow highly efficient appointment scheduling, the benefits of these systems can become liabilities when the realities of everyday life are introduced in the form of delayed parties to the scheduled appointments, and the current lack of an effective system for identifying and providing timely notification that a party is likely to be delayed for a scheduled appointment.